– “Thersites, the Iliad, and Not Knowing Your Place” by David Auerbach

– “What Does Hafez Say?” By Ahmad Kasravi

– “The Defense of Poesy” By Philip Sydney

– “The Language of Paradox” By Cleanth Brooks

– The Idea of “Anxiety of Influence” By Harold Bloom

– “Dominant, Residual, Emergent” By Raymond Williams

– Harold Bloom’s attack against Slam Poetry:

“I can’t bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn’t even silly; it is the death of art.”

– William Blake’s commentary on Paradise Lost:

“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”

– Section 1, Chapter 1 of “Our Oriental Heritage” By Will Durant

– “A Modest Proposal” By Jonathan Swift (As a model for a text that is made of a long unbroken “sustained irony”)